April 3, 2024
(New York Times) – A troubled heart pump that has now been linked to 49 deaths and dozens of injuries worldwide will be allowed to remain in use, despite the Food and Drug Administration’s decision to issue an alert about … Read More
April 2, 2024
(IEEE Spectrum) – Now, a team from the University of Utah says they’ve developed a better solution: an all-in-one hybrid energy-generation unit specifically designed for eye-based tech. In a paper published in the journal Small on 13 March, the researchers … Read More
April 1, 2024
(Wired) – Effective altruism pitches itself as a hyperrational method of using any resource for the maximum good of the world. Here in Silicon Valley, EA has become a secular religion of the elites. Effective altruists filled the board of … Read More
March 27, 2024
(Reuters) – A U.S. lawmaker involved in health policy has asked the Food and Drug Administration why it did not inspect Elon Musk’s Neuralink before allowing the brain implant company to test its device in humans. Reuters reported last month … Read More
March 26, 2024
(Wall Street Journal) – Jeffrey Keefer lay on an operating table in the oldest hospital in America surrounded by a surgical team, a group of engineers and a gaggle of spectators hoping to witness the early stages of a healthcare … Read More
March 21, 2024
(New York Times) – Surgeons in Boston have transplanted a kidney from a genetically engineered pig into an ailing 62-year-old man, the first procedure of its kind. If successful, the breakthrough offers hope to hundreds of thousands of Americans whose … Read More
March 21, 2024
(Nature) – A small Indian biotechnology company is producing a home-grown version of a cutting-edge cancer treatment known as chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy that was pioneered in the United States. CAR-T therapies are used mainly to treat blood … Read More
March 21, 2024
(Wired) – On Wednesday, Neuralink introduced the first human subject to receive the company’s brain implant, a 29-year-old man who has been paralyzed from the shoulders down for eight years after a diving accident. In a brief livestream on the … Read More
March 19, 2024
(Axios) – One of the fastest-growing trends in health and wellness circles was once seen solely as the domain of diabetics: watching your blood sugar. Why it matters: The weight-loss drug boom and online health influencers’ attention on regulating blood … Read More
March 18, 2024
(MIT Technology Review) – For too long, modern medicine has focused on treating disease rather than preventing it, they say. They believe that it’s time to move from reactive healthcare to proactive healthcare. And to do so in a credible … Read More
March 15, 2024
(Axios) – Food and Drug Administration advisers Friday will weigh the risk of premature patient deaths from adverse events when they consider expanding the use of two CAR-T therapies for multiple myeloma. Why it matters: CAR-T treatments have shown promise … Read More
March 14, 2024
(ABC News) – A new strategy to fight an extremely aggressive type of brain tumor showed promise in a pair of experiments with a handful of patients. Scientists took patients’ own immune cells and turned them into “living drugs” able … Read More
March 11, 2024
(Wall Street Journal) – It sounds like science fiction, but Odunsi is among dozens of people participating in studies on a controversial new forefront of the gene-editing revolution. Regulators last year approved the world’s first medicine using Crispr, the Nobel … Read More
March 7, 2024
(The Atlantic) – The disease once guaranteed an early death—but a new treatment has given many patients a chance to live decades longer than expected. What do they do now? After a year on Trikafta, Jenny told Teresa something that … Read More
March 5, 2024
(Nature) – Cells taken from the fluid around growing fetuses have been used to make organoids, 3D bundles of cells that mimic tissue. These organoids could help researchers to understand diseases that develop in the fetus during pregnancy. The researchers … Read More
March 1, 2024
(Associated Press) – Two scientists at a high-security infectious disease laboratory in Canada lost their jobs after reviews found they failed to protect sensitive material and information and did not acknowledge links with China, newly released records show. The scientists, … Read More
February 29, 2024
(NPR) – At the end of the drive, I meet David Ayares, who runs Revivicor Inc., a biotech company based in Blacksburg, Virginia. Ayares has invited me to be the first journalist to tour the company’s research farm, which is … Read More
February 29, 2024
(Reuters) – U.S. Food and Drug Administration inspectors found problems with record keeping and quality controls for animal experiments at Elon Musk’s Neuralink, less than a month after the startup said it was cleared to test its brain implants in … Read More
February 27, 2024
(Aeon) – Good Chemistry takes viewers behind the scenes and beyond the headlines of the CRISPR gene-editing breakthrough. Centred on the work of the French microbiologist Emmanuelle Charpentier and the US biochemist Jennifer Doudna, who together became the first all-female … Read More
February 23, 2024
(MIT Technology Review) – The Alabama legal ruling is clearly animated by religion—there are lots of Bible quotes and references to “murder” when discussing abortion. But what hasn’t gotten as much notice is the court’s specific argument that an embryo … Read More
February 22, 2024
(Vox) – If you take it for granted that nobody can listen in on your innermost thoughts, I regret to inform you that your brain may not be private much longer. You may have heard that Elon Musk’s company Neuralink … Read More
February 21, 2024
(Nature) – The CRISPR–Cas9 gene-editing system excels at altering and disrupting genes. But the changes it makes are permanent, which can be a big problem if the system goes awry. Now, a CRISPR-based system that targets a cell’s short-lived messenger … Read More
February 21, 2024
(Axios) – While CAR-T has been successful in some blood cancers, it’s not yet been approved for solid tumors, which make up about 90% of cancer types. The new therapy class — tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes, or TIL — uses immune cells from … Read More
February 21, 2024
(Undark) – The swabbers were sampling what’s called environmental DNA, or eDNA, representing the assortment of cells that all humans, animals, and microorganisms naturally shed as they go about their everyday lives, leaving genetic fingerprints. The scientists gradually quantified and … Read More
February 21, 2024
(Nature) – Although the main impetus behind the work is to help restore functions to people with paralysis, the technology also gives researchers a unique way to explore how the human brain is organized, and with greater resolution than most … Read More
